


wildwood

by isawet



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Universe, F/F, Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-28
Updated: 2017-07-28
Packaged: 2018-12-08 00:35:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11635251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isawet/pseuds/isawet
Summary: Clarke thought Lexa would be a wild thing.





	wildwood

**Author's Note:**

> not beta-ed. posted for archiving purposes from tumblr.

When Clarke was three, she drew a picture of her family. The Ark waxstick made her fingers smell and peeled little shavings under her fingernails but she screwed up her face and bit her lip and stuck the tip of her tongue out and held it in a ham toddler fist and scrawled on the paper. She drew trees in the background because they had just learned about them, walking in a tiny wobbly line of children to look at farm station and stick their hands into the dirt. She drew herself taller than her mother because they’d had a fight just that morning and she was still mad about it, wild hair because her mother hates it when she doesn’t comb it just right and fix her part just perfect.

She showed it to her father the next morning and he watched the stick figures toddle across the page with flailing arms and three straw thin fingers per hand. Kissed the top of her head and told her she was talented but hesitated when she asked him to tape it to the steel grey wall. He kept her from the creche and argued with her mother in harsh whispers in the other room while she played with her blocks on the floor.

“Honey,” her mother started, and told her she can’t ever do that again, not ever. Clarke cried when they shredded her drawing in the sink and rinsed the scraps with water until it slid, pulplike, down the drain.

++

“Hey,” Wells whispered during the meal break when Clarke was twelve. “Clarke.”

She sat next to him and they huddled close, shoulders bumping, ducking their heads to peer under the table. Wells opened his hands, damp from faint sweat, the room starting to smell more and more like adolescent hormones everyday. Resting on his palms were two paper cutouts, hands linked and twirling on folded edge feet. Wells whistled, soft and low, and they danced on the strings of his tune.

They giggled and Clarke leaned her head on his shoulder and when the teacher came Wells had to crush them between his fingers and sit on them. After, Clarke found them under the table and took them home, using the tips of her nails to piece them back together and smooth them out, but they wouldn’t dance no matter what she hummed.

++

When Clarke is locked up she draws all over the walls because otherwise she’d sit on her cot and rock with her face in her hands and shake. She talks to herself and to her drawings and has dreams where the colours swirl together to create galaxies and swallow her whole.

Just before they come to take her away and send her hurtling to Earth she draws her father on the back of her calf with her nail, digging in until the blood runs quick and thin and wet over her fingers. The face twists in a soft smile and she can almost hear his voice again.

++

On the ground Bellamy touches the petal of a flower, thinking Octavia would like to see it; it withers before his eyes and turns to dust. He never tells anyone.

When Raven dreams she floats above the ground and her knee doesn’t hurt. She touches the stars and hisses when they flare on her skin. She sucks her burned fingertip between her teeth and naps curled up on the glow grey disk of the moon.

“What did you think I did up there stuck under the floors?” Octavia asks. Her knife never breaks and when she throws it she can’t miss even when she tries. Rabbits lay at her feet and stop breathing and fish float to the surface as soon as her lure is cast.

++

When Lexa walks the grass parts before her, whispering in the dirt until she passes before closing again, a zipper path of green wherever she goes. The Grounders are just as transfixed as Clarke is, staring and bowing and averting their eyes, but it’s nothing compared to the horror that contorts her mother’s face, mirrored on Kane’s.

In Polis the tapestries ripple when Lexa is near, images flickering across. When Clarke held a knife to Lexa’s throat a wall hanging showed a girl with dark skin and tightly wound curls and deep dark glassy eyes clouded with death, her face wrapped in the bloody red velvet of Lexa’s stash.

++

Clarke wanders the marketplace alone and pretends not to notice the Grounders noticing her, from the children that flit through the streets stealing glances and daring each other to touch the hem of her dress to the vendors who go guarded and nervous when she pauses in front of them.

She manages to lose her Lexa issued shadow, an older boy with a clean shaved face and a haircut Clarke has noticed on several of the young men. She thinks she’s getting a handle on Grounder fashion. She walks until she finds a fountain and sits cross-legged in front of it, enjoying the quiet solitude and the muted foot traffic sounds from just around the corner of the building.

“Clarke.”

She looks up. Lexa is fully dressed, sword at her hip, although she’s forgone the warpaint and the pauldron. “I thought it would be different. Earth.”

Lexa sits next to her in the dirt, her legs extended. She leans back against a stone wall and crosses her ankles. “Why?”

Clarke frowns at the fountain, her eyes only half focused. “It’s not what they told us it would be. Not what we learned in class. I think maybe… maybe we forgot what we were, before. And we can’t figure out how to remember.”

“Hm.” Lexa takes Clarke’s hand in her own, gloved about the palm in a criss cross of fabric but bare everywhere else. Her skin is faintly cold against Clarke’s; her dark blood makes the veins stand out clear and visible. She traces the lines of Clarke’s palm with a single finger, sliding down to Clarke’s wrist and resting above the flutter of her pulse. “Your people haven’t forgotten, Clarke, they’ve erased.”

Lexa tilts her eyes at the fountain and Clarke can hear the pipes open up, the rush of water. It smells like rain wet rocks and rushing rivers and the water is impossibly clear. Lexa stands and offers her hand and when Clarke takes it they walk to the edge of the fountain. Lexa dips her palm and sips from it, her face eerie in its reflection. She offers her hand again and Clarke takes it, their thumbs overlapping as they walk back.

Clarke looks back before they turn the corner and when she tightens her grip on Lexa’s hand the water turns black and thick, overflowing like tar and staining the cobblestones.

++

“Criss cross applesauce,” Clarke says.

Lexa’s eyes flutter open. Her brow furrows gently. “You want apples,” she concludes after a moment, and opens her mouth as if to call for a servant. Clarke presses her palm against Lexa’s lips, dry and soft plush, pale pink. Her skin is warm only when Lexa exhales.

Clarke realizes it’s been more than a single minute, Lexa’s eyes quiet and thoughtful on her own. She drops her hand. “An old saying,” she says, “from the Ark.” She lays back on Lexa’s plush carpet, looking up at the candles in their metal cages as they sway gently in the air. The ceiling is painted black and Clarke can almost see the twinkle of stars instead of flickering flame against its backdrop. “It was like… mashed apples and cinnamon and other stuff, I don’t know.”

“Warm?”

“No, I don’t think so. In cans.”

Lexa’s nose wrinkles in Clarke’s peripheral vision. She says something in trigedasleng and then, seeing Clarke’s blank look, searches for a translation. “Pickled?”

“No, like–” Clarke gropes for a description, then is startled silent when Lexa leans over her, not straddling but pressed hip to hip, intimate, her hair tumbling over one shoulder. She reaches over and dips into a candle and the flame curls around her fingers like a cat, popping playfully and making her skin glow. She holds her hand just above Clarke’s heart, and Clarke can smell the melted wax puddled in the cup of her palm.

“Close your eyes,” Lexa tells her.

Clarke thinks about the night she couldn’t sleep and her mother let her sneak out of her little cot and sit on the couch and took the big glass jar down from the cabinet, exaggerated tiptoeing and finger pressed to her lips. How she said it was their little secret and they shared a spoon. She screws her eyes shut and remembers the smell of it, the texture, the way it slid over her tongue and how it tasted and what the softness looked like in her mother’s face before it faded away entirely.

When she opens her eyes she’s propped up on her elbow and there’s applesauce in the palm of Lexa’s hand. They peer at it together and the tip of Lexa’s tongue is delicate and pink when it flickers out for a taste. Clarke watches her consider it. “We have something similar,” Lexa says, hesitant. “Sweeter, the apples are thicker. It’s a dessert, served warm.”

Clarke dips a finger into the applesauce, poking against Lexa’s palm before sucking the food off her skin. “Huh.” It’s almost exactly as she remembers it, down to the faint metal tang of the spoon that lingers on the tongue.

Lexa is watching her, eyes flickered down to her lips before sliding to the side. They’re so close Clarke can make out the flecks of glitter on Lexa’s face, the difference in colour between them. 

“Criss cross applesauce,” Lexa says, calm. She slides away, giving Clarke her space back, and folds her legs up just so.

++

Clarke is screaming, raging. She shoves her papers off the small desk in her rooms and throws the ink wells at the walls, leaving splatter marks of dark wet black drops.

“You’re being childish,” Lexa says from the doorway, low. “It’s beneath you.”

Clarke whirls, out of breath. “Murderer,” she whispers, breathless but poison sharp, and means every syllable.

Lexa doesn’t flinch, but her chin dips faintly before rising again. “We all do what we must.”

“There’s another way,” Clarke insists, “there is always another way.”

Lexa advances on her, boots thumping. The force of her is overwhelming; a butterfly against an avalanche and Clarke retreats. “There is not,” Lexa says, through her teeth and as angry as Clarke has ever seen her, “always another way. You cannot lead your people and not understand this. This isn’t blood must have blood. This isn’t the way of my people, Clarke. This is the way of _people_.”

Clarke exhales, sharp. She looks away and the crackling thunder static of the room fades abruptly, leaving the smell of ozone in the frizz of their hair. She feels, suddenly, very young. Irrationally, she wishes her mother were here. The scar of her father on her leg stings; she hasn’t looked at it in months because she’s afraid he wouldn’t recognize her anymore.

Lexa touches the mess on the wall, rivulets running down the stone. She drags her nail and it scratches, but in its wake the ink draws back up and out, solidifying. By the time she’s done there’s a small cylinder pinched between her index finger and her thumb, roughly the shape of a quill and the exact shade of the blood at the corner of Lexa’s mouth where her lip is split. A small knife appears from her sleeve and she carves a nib off the end, creating a pointed tip. 

“May I?”

Clarke opens her mouth and Lexa places it in the center of her tongue. It tastes the ocean, deep and endless and cruelly indifferent. Lexa presses the pen into her hand; Clarke swallows and licks the salt from her teeth.

++

Clarke draws Wells and can’t get his smile right; it twists and melts off his face and she can’t bare to see him so in pain. She tries Bellamy next and realizes she can’t remember the last time she saw him happy; when she tries to sketch him in the early days a blackness starts in his temples and above his heart and she sits at the desk and cries for ten minutes before burning it.  
She draws Anya’s hand in hers; the way Octavia’s lips quirked when she practiced trigedasleng because it made Lincoln smile. The sound of Raven’s laugh and the way it felt when Monty hugged her.

Lexa flows from her head to her fingers and back up to her heart and she can’t finish it because she can feel something rolling in her stomach. She reaches down her throat and tries to pull it out and throw it in the fire but it won’t come out. She finds a mirror and reminds herself of standing on a mountain and watching Lexa walk away covered in blood but the mirror just cracks and reflects herself back in a hundred shards.

++

Lexa’s room reminds Clarke of the tree she waited in, before she felt the weight of the panther on her chest and the searing pain of claws ripping through her skin. Bright moss and cold grey morning sunshine and the distant sounds of bubbling water and Lexa moves through it like a hurricane; when Clarke is in the eye of it the air is so still Lexa has to hold her sleeve to keep Clarke’s feet on the ground.

She smoothes Clarke’s hair down and watches it float back up with a quiet upturn of one side of her mouth. She says Clarke’s name and she tastes like rain and when she kisses the crooked white divot at her temple Anya left behind it fades away like it was never there. Clarke stops her, cradling Lexa’s jaw, before she can disappear the arcing scar the panther gave her. “That one is mine,” she whispers, and Lexa smiles.

“You understand,” she murmurs.

“I’m starting to.” Clarke dozes tucked against Lexa’s side and when she wakes up the tattoo from Lexa’s arm has crawled around her own bicep. She touches it with a finger and it flickers at her, almost anxious, until she lays her head on Lexa’s shoulder and goes back to sleep.

++

Clarke expected Lexa to be a wild thing. Watched her fingers twirl her knives and grasp her swords and silence grown warriors with the tiniest flexing flick. But Lexa exhales when her pauldron slides free. She folds her sash carefully but stretches when it puddles onto the floor. Her eyes are softer without it and her tattoos are sharper. She is somehow both less and more of herself.

She likes it when Clarke undoes her braids. Her chest rumbles and her blinks go slow. When Clarke draws her standing in front of her throne the charcoal melts and reforms: Lexa reclined on the pillows with her head in Clarke’s lap and a flower behind her ear.

She loves it when Clarke stays, after. She never asks or hints when Clarke slips out from under the furs and dresses with her muscles still shaky, but when Clarke exhales and just rolls over to nose into the pillow Clarke can feel the tension slide away. Clarke wakes up with Lexa tucked against her side and her arm over Lexa’s waist and feels possessive when a handmaiden lets her eyes linger on Lexa’s skin. The tiny freckles and the scars Clarke has mapped with her tongue and her fingers.

She curls her lip and rumbles her growl and Lexa just smiles. She takes Clarke’s hand when they’re alone and sucks her teeth into Clarke’s wrist until the capillaries burst and it bruises purple and green and yellow; the colours roll like a sunburst. Clarke kisses behind Lexa’s ear hard enough to draw blood, copper across her teeth. It stains her lips black for days.

++

When they’re angry it’s the snap crack pop of ozone and blue static sparks that makes Clarke’s hair stand straight up and she rides Lexa with slow deliberate lift fall rolls of her hips and won’t go faster no matter how much Lexa snarls and hisses and Lexa’s clenched fingers in the sheets leave dark scorchmarks. She lays Clarke out afterwards and rubs the ashes into Clarke’s skin; writes their history into the bones of Clarke’s ribcage in images because she lost the alphabet long before Clarke fell from her sky.

Snarling kisses and Lexa weathers Clarkes rage like it’s a summer storm. Clarke can back her up across a room and press Lexa’s spine against the wall, Heda retreating before a sky girl’s advance, but Lexa always meets her eyes and swallows and tells her this is what it is, to lead a people. This is what it feels like to be truly and forever alone.

++

Clarke thought, maybe–the same feeling when she saw that land mine explode. The gun smell of the powder and the boom in her chest. She used to hear the click of the pressure plate when Lexa touched her and she had to hold her rage against the roof of her mouth with the tip of her tongue to keep herself from swallowing it down and forgetting it. 

But instead it’s softer. Lexa’s bed smells like jasmine and her calluses leave goosebumps on Clarke’s skin. There’s dirt under Clarke’s nails and in her pores and when Lexa kisses her it vibrates away and leaves her pale and untouched. it dances when the bed shakes and wildflowers sprout up between the grains.

Lexa holds her legs apart and her hips down and drags her tongue up Clarke’s thigh and Clarke squeezes her eyes shut to watch the colours flash on her closed lids and when she comes it’s a shaky barely there exhale, her toes curling up and Lexa’s palms gentle on the points of her hips.

 _Clarke_ Lexa murmurs, against the wet slick gush of her thighs, and her whisper curls around every clench flutter, slipping up Clarke’s center and through her belly and kissing her heart before escaping through the moans that drip from Clarke’s slack open mouth.

++

The thing is, Lexa is a wild thing.

Her braids never lay quite flat and sometimes she speaks to voices that aren’t there. Clarke hears them, once, when she’s half dreaming half awake and Lexa’s fingers are still inside her. they speak english and fragmented trigedasleng and they’re so full of rage and grief.

Lexa is still and calm but underneath she boils. Her voice cracks from her throat like a whip and when she runs her enemies through with her sword she looks as close to truly peaceful as Clarke has ever seen her. 

She stands in a clearing and a baby doe sways from the trees, stumbling on its fawn legs. Clarke stands with her feet sunk in the mud like quicksand and watches Lexa pull the heart from the white chest. Lexa sinks her teeth into the pulsing muscle and they fuck in the middle of the river, the water flowing around them and leaving them bone dry. She smears her bloody face into Clarke’s throat and calls her _wanheda_ when the thunder claps.

++

Clarke thinks she’s lost her rage and the sharp clarity of vision it gave her. She misses it.

But in the morning, when the earth coaxes the sun to rise with birdsong and Lexa lights the candles by touching the tip of her tongue to the wick. When her eyes smile at Clarke when they pass in the hallways. The first time Clarke sees the ocean and her breath catches at the vastness of it, the peace of being insignificant and tiny against the universe. 

She doesn’t miss anything when her fingers touch Lexa’s; Lexa’s breathing hitches when Clarke kisses the delicate curve of her ear. Thunder in their chests and their names look right next to each other; the static keeps them together.

**Author's Note:**

> let me know what you think and catch me on tumblr @ sunspill


End file.
